Donald Trump's proposal to halt Muslim immigration unprecedented, but rooted in history

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Although Donald Trump made headlines this week when calling to temporarily halt the immigration of Muslims into the U.S., the 2016 Republican presidential front-runner's unique proposal doesn't come without some historical precedence.

Citing fears over terrorism and religious extremism, Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" during a Monday rally – a move that sparked immediate and harsh criticism from other presidential candidates, political leaders and civil rights activists.

The businessman, who is known for making controversial statements on the campaign trail, has pointed to history to defend his Muslim immigration proposal, comparing it to efforts President Franklin Roosevelt undertook to limit the rights of Japanese, German and Italian nationals living in the U.S. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor during World War II.

While the two efforts share some similarities, and politicians' calls to halt immigration of certain groups is not new, historians contend that Trump is unique in explicitly targeting a religious affiliation.

According to C.N. Le, a senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Department of Sociology, the U.S. has a had a long history of using immigration laws to restrict people from certain countries, regions and ethnic groups.

"The basic precedent of banning entire groups has been set before and is something the U.S. can easily do if there's enough political pressure," he said in an interview, adding that such policies seem to crop up more when the economy struggles.

Le pointed to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which he said was signed into law after an influx of Chinese immigrants arrived in California following the gold rush and represented economic competition.

The law, which was renewed every 10 years and expanded in 1917 to include all Asian countries, set two important precedents: banning an entire group of people and using U.S. immigration law to determine what rights those already in country had, Le said.

As the country moved to halt Chinese immigrants, a group of Bostonians concerned by increasing Irish Catholic dominance in their city similarly sought to ban Irish, French Canadian, Italian, Polish, Greek and other primarily Catholic ethnic groups, according to Beth Salerno, chair of the history department at Saint Anselm College.

The growing anti-immigration sentiments against these groups led to additional bans in the 1920s, where the U.S. set ethnic immigration quotas based on who was in the country in the late 1800s – a largely Protestant population, she said.

The country revamped its immigration laws in 1965, when it moved away from quotas to focus more on a person's skills and number of relatives living in the U.S. Since then, Le said, the country's immigration laws have been more expansive and slightly more welcoming to legal immigrants.

However, he noted that there have been periodic examples of the U.S. banning people, like a temporary halt of allowing immigrants from Haiti due to fears surrounding HIV and AIDs in the 1980s.

While underlying religious fears may have motivated some of the immigration bans, America has never banned outright a group based on its religious beliefs, Salerno said.

Groups like the Ku Klux Klan have called for explicit religious bans, but politicians have kept the conversation focused more on things like ethnicity, literacy, health and ability to contribute to the country – not a specific religious argument, she said. That, Salerno contended, makes Trump unusual.

"Politicians talk openly about protecting America's jobs, but not about America's churches," she said in an interview.

According to Le, politicians using nativist language is not an uncommon phenomenon during election season.

"It unfortunately is pretty firmly embedded in the tradition of politics, whenever someone wants to get elected they attack incumbents and find scapegoats," he said. "And those targets tend to be immigrants, people of color and other minority group members."

Salerno added that while it's not unheard of for a politician to call for an immigration ban, it has become much less common in recent decades.

"One could safely say on this topic that Trump is a throwback to the 19th century or early 20th century," she said.

Although such political rhetoric is not new, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told reporters this week that it's still painful – particularly when targeted at a population like Muslim refugees from Syria, of whom the vast majority, he said, are widows and orphans.

Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, however, cautioned that Trump's proposal signals a much larger issue and stressed that each person has a role to play in changing the current political climate in which people cannot disagree without resorting to bashing.

"It's easy to point to a figure and blame this on a single individual with the greatest access to a loud microphone," she said in a conference call with reporters. "It's far beyond that. It's something we need to check ourselves on as a society as a whole."